Closing the Gap: On Teaching High School and College

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At the small public high school where I teach, the COWs — computers on wheels — are herded in a room lined with wicker post-and-rail fences and fake grass. Our campus is tucked in the woods, with the county library on one side. We have one of the only working school planetariums in the state. A single, two-story building shaped like an H, our school could have been the setting for The Breakfast Club.

After the final bell, students spill out the front and side doors. Seniors return in Jeeps for football practice. Freshman line the curb waiting for the bus to take them to a soccer scrimmage. Inside, a few students quietly work on calculus problems at long tables. Custodians stack chairs, close windows, and lock doors. Teachers and administrators exhale. Each day is a small victory.

I never planned on becoming a teacher. I never studied education. I loved high school, but that was mostly because my 400-student school offered individualized plans of study. I studied astronomy, poetry, and architecture. I spent a year doing an independent study on propulsion systems and Air Force commissioned investigations of flying saucers. I spent long afternoons running sprints on soccer fields, and cold Saturday mornings running full-court presses on the hardwood.

Yes, I never planned on becoming a teacher, and yet here I remain, more than a decade later. You can fake teaching, but you can’t fake being a teacher. Students know the ones who care, the ones who see them as individuals. Being a teacher requires a mixture of eccentricity, patience, empathy, humility, honesty, and more content knowledge than you can ever expect your students to master before they graduate.

Once a week, after my day teaching high school is done, I drive halfway down the Garden State to The College of New Jersey, where I teach fiction and poetry. In high school, I am a teacher. In college, I am a professor. We could argue the semantics here: contingent faculty rightly remind students that they are instructors, and not technically professors, lest students think they are making a salary truly commensurate with their worth. But when I am in a college classroom, my students don’t call me Mr. Ripatrazone. They call me professor.

My time spent teaching both high school and college has further revealed the chasm between these continents of education. High schools conceive of literature as a method to teach writing, and to a lesser extent, reading — but both within the scope of skills and standards. The current flavor, Common Core, won’t last, but it will be replaced by something equally imperfect. The freedom of college education allows for the study of literature as an end rather than a means. I think this ultimately matters because high school teachers and college professors are usually so culturally separated and yet linked within a pedagogical continuum. High school teachers pass off students to professors, the anchor leg of this marathon relay of education, but we aren’t running in sync. We’re not even running on the same track.

The lament is common: professors wonder how their high school students, specifically those who fill composition classes, are so woefully unprepared. They can’t write theses; they don’t write with specifics. They don’t know how to read critically; they don’t know how to think critically. These laments fill the print and virtual pages of publications like the Chronicle of Higher Education, or arrive as breathless social media complaints. I don’t want to deny anyone’s cathartic outlet. Professors have to deal with their own unfounded stereotypes, including that they don’t quite teach as much as “present” information — hiding their inert pedagogies behind claims that students must be “independent.”

I like to give my students the benefit of the doubt until it stops benefiting them, and I extend that to educators. In some ways, the differences between high school and college are healthy. We are dealing with students at vastly different stages of their emotional, social, and intellectual development. The summer between high school graduation and a student’s first night in a college dorm room contains enough changes and anxieties to fill an epic poem.

Wouldn’t this transition be eased if there were more communication and collaboration between high school teachers and professors? I have seen this done successfully. Most of my current high school courses are college prep, but one section, Practices of Academic Writing, is a Syracuse University course. Unlike dual enrollment courses, Syracuse’s Project Advance program offers actual college courses, for which students receive college credit, and are taught by instructors certified as university instructors (which means I am technically an adjunct at both Syracuse and The College of New Jersey, a fine trick of bilocation).

I find the Syracuse program exemplary because it encourages and thrives on the exact dialogue absent between high school teachers and college professors. During the introductory unit of the course, my students read a range of non-fiction, including Sherman Alexie’s “Superman and Me,” Walter Mosley’s “Patter and Patois,” and George Saunders’s “Thank You, Esther Forbes,” before composing their own personal essays. Their pieces are part literacy narratives, part dramatizations of their beliefs — but aren’t delivered in the single-note brevity that makes so many college application essays feel robotic and mannered.

The approach of the Syracuse program — which is guided by the same professors who teach mirror courses on the actual campus — is to focus on analysis of genre as an entry into college writing. A high school teacher might use Alexie’s “Superman and Me” to complement a full-length book or unit, but she might not engage Alexie’s genre as literary structure. This is not a deficiency of the high school teacher’s approach; it is exhausting for students when a text is exhausted. Yet the genre analysis of Alexie’s work makes our rote proclamations of “writing as process” come alive. It hurts my soul to learn how few of my high school students will go on to major in English, but those students will never stop writing. A genre approach to reading and writing gives students confidence and control. So often high school teachers seek to prepare students to become strong high school writers — which sets them up for failure the moment they enter a college classroom.

This is not to say that professors can’t also learn from their high school counterparts. Talented high school teachers know the power of classroom performance, the charged feeling of fully inhabiting a closed space. The day of a teacher is fast and often frenzied. No wonder teachers pine for the summer; they earn it. Professors work equally as hard, but it can be refreshingly jarring to spend a day with a high school teacher as he moves from teaching Caedmon’s hymn to Andre Dubus’s “Digging,” followed by lunch duty, breaking-up a fight, trekking down to the soccer field during an evacuation drill, and ending the day trying to convince a student that she matters despite the drama of a broken friendship or a fractured family.

We tend to best remember the teachers who changed our lives in the moments after class more so than those who awed us between the bells. Teachers who offered advice or compassion when most needed. Teachers who listened. My favorite high school teacher was Mr. Shoemaker, who guided me through my entertaining and odd independent study. I still have a letter he wrote me after I received rejection letters from colleges. Those months were like a storm in my high school life, and his words were calming. It was not his role to tell me that my frustration over college rejections was minor in the grand scheme of world suffering. He knew I would realize that soon enough. One mark of a great teacher is knowing exactly what a student needs in an individual moment.

Such gifts are not exclusive to high school teachers. Although our methods and locations might be different, teachers and professors hopefully share the same coda: we wish to leave students a little better off than we first met them. Whether that improvement is statistical or spiritual is irrelevant. Everyone seems to have an opinion about our American educational system, so I’ll conclude with mine: the most important curve in the lives of our students occurs when they leave the structured comfort of a high school classroom and enter the comparative freedom of a college classroom. Our students will perform better once we close the gap. We might even experience the additional miracle of becoming better teachers, professors, and mentors.

Nick Ripatrazone
is a staff writer for The Millions. He has written for Rolling Stone, The Paris Review, The Atlantic, Esquire, and The Kenyon Review. His newest book is Ember Days, a collection of stories. He lives in New Jersey with his wife and twin daughters. Follow him @nickripatrazone and find more of his writing at www.nickripatrazone.com.

Even Anthony Doerr seems puzzled by the runaway success of his second novel All the Light We Cannot See. As Doerr pointed out in a recent interview with The New York Times, the novel, set during World War II, features a sympathetic young Nazi as one of its main characters and contains lengthy passages about early radio technology and carbon bonds. “This book has trigonometric equations in it -- it’s really dense,” he told The Times. “The kinds of readers I’m writing for, I thought they would like it, but I didn’t think Aunt Judy would read it.”
Yet Aunt Judy, and all her friends and relations, have rushed out to buy Doerr’s novel by the bagful. In the seven months between the book’s publication last May and Christmas, its publisher, Scribner had to reprint it 25 times, putting 920,000 copies in circulation. According to The Times, Amazon ran out of copies during the peak Christmas book-buying season, as did a number of independent bookstores. As of January 18, the novel holds the #1 spot on The Times hardcover fiction bestseller list, where it has sat for many of the 35 weeks it has appeared on the list.
The Times piece cites Scribner's deft marketing plan, which called for Doerr to meet personally with independent booksellers months before publication, as a factor in the novel’s success. It no doubt helped that the book is superbly researched, and that the story it tells of the wartime technological advances that helped spark our own digital revolution is rich and intelligent in ways that other recent fictional accounts of this history, like the hit film The Imitation Game, are obtuse and ill-informed. Doerr also knows how to craft vivid characters and spin a compulsively readable tale.
But none of this adequately accounts for how All the Light We Cannot See became a literary sensation. In the hands of most writers, the novel’s subject matter alone would have turned off many ordinary readers. Forget the abstruse math and nice Nazis. This is a 500-page novel about a war increasingly few Americans are old enough to remember, in which not one of the principal characters is American. This is a recipe for a well-regarded literary novel, perhaps even a prize-winning critical darling. But a breakout bestseller so popular it leaves Amazon’s vast warehouses empty of copies at Christmas? Not likely.
So what then explains the success of All the Light We Cannot See? It all, I would argue, comes down to Doerr's sentences, in particular his masterly use of nouns and verbs.
If I were ever allowed to teach in a MFA program, I would offer a course called “The Nitty Gritty: Sentence Structure for Creative Writers.” In this course that I will probably never teach, we would begin by reacquainting ourselves with the parts of speech and the lost art of diagramming sentences. We would look at more fine-grained points of style, too, like metaphor and simile, symbol and imagery, but first we would look just at the sentences. Students would take passages at random from books they love and diagram the sentences, creating those funny little word trees of nouns and verbs and prepositional phrases that many of us learned how to make in sixth grade and then promptly forgot. Then we would talk about what we’d found. How does William Faulkner construct those big, long baroque sentences of his? What’s the verb-to-adverb ratio in Toni Morrison’sBeloved? What is Leslie Jamison doing with her nouns that allows her to use so few adjectives?
After we analyzed the sentences of the masters, we would turn to our own work. This would make for a painful few weeks, since no apprentice writer, no matter how precocious, starts out writing like Faulkner or Morrison. But the primary purpose here wouldn’t be comparison, but analysis: How do we as writers build our sentences, and why? Taking passages at random from our own most successful work, we would break the sentences down to their component parts, phrase by phrase, clause by clause, to see how they work. How long, on average, are the sentences? What are each student’s go-to tropes? How many versions of the verb “to be” appear per page? Does the diction in the dialogue vary enough that it’s clear who is speaking even when we remove the dialogue tags? What if we changed that noun, made it more precise -- would that allow us to strike the adjective?
Our final project would be to rewrite our stories, starting with the sections we analyzed most closely, then taking the lessons learned from those passages and applying them to the rest of the story. No doubt many students would turn in drafts of stories very similar to their originals, just a little tighter and more polished. But a few, maybe one or two per semester, might see their stories mysteriously catch fire, watch their characters do strange and unexpected things, because, as anyone who works daily with language knows, all ideas, all stories and plots and characters that appear in a work of prose, originate first in the sentences, in our choices of nouns and verbs.
Were I a student in my own thought-experiment of a writing course, I would choose All the Light We Cannot See as my case study. I have so many deficiencies as a prose stylist that it’s hard to keep track of them, but right now what’s really bothering me is my verbosity. I am trying to teach myself the delicate art of compression, which is, as I am learning, principally means getting better at choosing nouns and verbs. And Anthony Doerr is a master at picking nouns and verbs.
Let me give an example of Doerr’s prose, chosen at random on page 40 of the hardcover edition, five paragraphs from the top of the page:
Cars splash along the streets, and snowmelt drums through the runnels; she can hear snowflakes tick and patter through the trees.
See what I mean? At the level of pure language, without context, the sentence is beautiful. Each clause is compact, just a noun, a verb, and a prepositional phrase specifying location. Twenty-one words, and not one an adjective or adverb. Why would he need one? The nouns and verbs are doing all the work. A lesser writer, for instance, might have written: “Cars splash violently through puddles along the busy street,” but Doerr understands that if a sentence is vivid enough, readers will supply all that ancillary information. The next clause -- “and snowmelt drums through the runnels” -- is even more evocative. I don’t need to know what runnels are to hear the expanding snowmelt drumming through them. (Okay, I looked it up: a runnel is “a narrow channel or course, as for water,” which, not surprisingly, was what I’d pictured.)
Doerr is doing here what only great prose stylists can do, tapping all the senses, creating not just a visual image, but an aural and tactile one as well. If you are coming to this sentence without having read his book, you can’t know where this scene takes place or at what time of year. And yet you do. It has to be in a city, probably a big one where cars move fast through the streets. And it must be wintertime, deep in winter when the late-season snows are mixing with the runoff from melting snow of the false spring. If I add that the scene is set in Paris on a Tuesday in late March a few years before the German invasion of France, you are instantly transported to that time and place: you can see it, you can hear it, you can feel that sharp winter cold in your bones. Twenty-one words, three simple clauses, and wham, you are there.
But if you have read the book, you know this is only the beginning of why this sentence -- which, hand to God, I really did pick at random -- is so brilliant. Much of All the Light We Cannot See alternates between the points of view of two central characters, a young German soldier named Werner, and a blind French girl named Marie-Laure. This chapter, titled simply “Light,” is told from the perspective of Marie-Laure. Read the sentence again, and you will see why it could only be from the perspective of Marie-Laure: cars splash, snowmelt drums, snowflakes tick and patter. The sentence is all verbs, all of them vividly aural. What at first may seem like poetic license (does melting snow really “drum”?) is in fact character exposition: This is a view of the world from someone who must perceive everything through her ears and fingertips.
This is crucial to understanding not just the character of Marie-Laure, but also the broader thematic concerns of Doerr’s book, which, as its title suggests, is about the ways we perceive the world without using our eyes. Marie-Laure’s father builds elaborate scale models of their neighborhood so she can navigate the world without him. Werner, a young German math genius, helps perfect the use of radio waves to ferret out resistance fighters operating deep in the Ukrainian forests. Werner’s friend Frederick sees an owl in a night sky where others see only a pool of blackness. And we all, readers and characters alike, chase endlessly after a famous diamond that we never exactly see, whose value we deduce only by the ardor of those who chase after it.
And it’s all there in that one sentence five paragraphs down on page 40, the world alive and wriggling, captured with a few well-chosen nouns and verbs. I could pick out that sentence at random and build an entire essay around it because Doerr’s vision, and his gift for describing it in simple, striking nouns and verbs, is present on every page of the novel, which contains not a single uninteresting or trite sentence. Here it is, his prose insists, right here on the page: a world made of words, a world we make up in our heads as we read, using all the light we cannot see.

1.
For writers, literary inheritance is inexorable. Many suppress, some overcome, and a great deal are burdened by what Harold Bloom called the “anxiety of influence.” The writers who transcend their inheritance might allude to their precursors, tip their cap, and maybe even insert a line or two from the master into their work as a sign of respect.
But contemporary Spanish authors have taken a different approach. Refusing to settle for polite allusion, they instead dig up the masters and plop them into their narratives. Take Carlos Rojas’sThe Ingenious Gentleman and Poet Federico García Lorca Ascends to Hell, where the Garcia Lorca sits in hell watching his life acted out on stage. In The Savage Detectives, Roberto Bolaño’s itinerant characters embark on a quest for their literary gods. Enrique Vila-Matas’s novels pathologize literary influence; characters succumb to literary diseases (Montano’s Malady) and enter Hemingway lookalike contests.
So it’s no surprise that Spain would produce Marcos Giralt Torrente, a writer fixated on influence and inheritance. Giralt Torrente is already well-respected in Spain, where he has won the Herralde Novel Prize and the Spanish National Book Award, but his name will be fairly new for most English readers. In the past year alone three of his books—the story collection, The End of Love, a novel, Paris, and his memoir, Father and Son: A Lifetime—have been published as English translations. Giralt Torrente is the son of painter Juan Giralt and the maternal grandson of esteemed Spanish novelist, Gonzalo Torrente Ballester. He would seem, therefore, the perfect candidate to carry the torch of his contemporaries. And yet, Giralt Torrente is less concerned with literary influence than he is with familial influence, the inheritance that haunts the person regardless of whether the author emerges.
2.Of the three books recently published, Giralt Torrente’s first novel, Paris, serves as the best introduction. Here he begins to develop the themes of memory, fidelity, deceit, and family that recur throughout his work. It is a dense, deeply reflective novel, narrated by a middle-aged man trying to understand his parents’ inexplicable marriage. The narrator is mesmerized and obsessed with his mother, a controlling, strong-willed woman whose selective disclosures have shaped what the narrator remembers from his childhood: “I have no way of finding out if she is also the reason I don’t know certain other things, things she deliberately kept from me. When our knowledge of a subject depends on the words of others, we can never be sure if they’ve told us everything or only a part.”
His memories, so thoroughly contaminated by her, cannot be trusted. Yet memory remains “a great temptation.” Tempting and addictive. A burden for those who seek comfort, for to remember is to struggle, to disentangle received narratives, reorder them, in a fruitless attempt to uncover the truth.
Not big T truth—though that’s all over Paris—but the basic truth, what happened and why. And what’s marvelous about Paris is that, despite its relative lack of action, the novel holds our attention, as we, too, read to uncover what happened. This is partly due to Giralt Torrente’s careful plotting, and partly due to a swaddling, syntactical empathy.
We want the narrator to get what he wants. Giralt Torrente doesn’t achieve this by making his character likeable, or vulnerable. Empathy, here, is achieved through the syntax. Giralt Torrente is a masterful sentence writer. He learned to write on a diet of Henry James, Faulkner, Proust, and Thomas Bernhard. Though his sentences, packed with dependent clauses and parenthetical flights, rarely reach the multi-page length of a Faulkner or Bernhard sentence, they beautifully and patiently trace the nuanced digressions of his characters’ minds. Here is a passage from Paris:
When we think about the past, it’s hard to resist both dividing it up into blocks in accordance with the pattern of events that have made the most impression on us and attributing powers to it that it does not have, allowing ourselves to believe that the arrival of a particular date had the ability to work some radical transformation on us. Until the death of my father, we say, I was like this or like that, when we should really say that on such and such a date, something that had already existed inside us began to make itself manifest or visible.
To borrow from William Gass, these sentences “contrive (through order, meaning, sound, and rhythm) a moving unity of fact and feeling.” As we read we think with the narrator thinking through the idea. The statement is felt rather than proven. And the use of the first person plural conflates narrator and readers. But there is a difference between Giralt Torrente’s use of the first person plural, and Javier Marias’s, who uses this technique quite often. In Marias “we” is broad and inclusive, sweeping through Madrid and Oxford, while in Giralt Torrente the “we” is restrictive, limited to his characters and his readers. We feel caught in the narrator’s mind, hearing it obsessively reassess, which is perhaps most reminiscent of Bernhard, where each sentence seals off the world like Montresor stacking the bricks in our tomb.
This insularity is heightened by Giralt Torrente’s reliance on first person in all three recent books. He describes his narrators as “witnesses, in general cultivated and very reflective, for whom doubting their perceptions, questioning them and clarifying them, is their way of being in the world.” Father and Son: A Lifetime indicates that is also how Giralt Torrente exists in the world. The memoir, written shortly after Giralt Torrente’s father died from cancer, meticulously explores their strained relationship in an attempt to “understand what [they] lost; where [they] got stuck.” Comprised of many short fragments, the memoir weaves together a loose chronology of their lives—the galleries they visited, the absences, the arguments, the conversations and women they shared—with lyrical, paratactic reflections: “We got stuck because his consummate solipsism made him accept the unspoken and I demanded action. . . . we both thought we deserved more than we had. . . . we got stuck because I made him the creditor of a debt that I tried to call in when it had already expired.”
Inheritance, for Giralt Torrente, is not strictly filial, but existential. The relationship between father and son in Father and Son, lets him explore personhood more broadly. The search for where they got stuck is inseparable from the search for identity. Was stubbornness to blame? Competiveness? And if they share those traits shouldn’t the son be let off the hook? How relieving it is to trace our most toxic traits to our parents. Inheritance is expiation—but it’s also original sin. Giralt Torrente’s work suggests character is inherent and untraceable. Discovering the seed of ourselves is as easy as pinching hydrogen atoms out of a river.
Perhaps this is why we often concede to our selfhood. As Giralt Torrente writes in Paris, our character “depends not on the appearance or disappearance of new characteristics but rather on the way in which certain already-existing characteristics win out over others.” To refuse to accept yourself is to grasp with irritable, buttery fingers. So we pivot to the question of when. Not when we became who we are—the narrator in Paris rightly debunks that search—but the discernible when: the choice that made everything different, the instant we acted a certain way and thus cemented the future. These are the moments that plague conspiracy theorists, jilted lovers, and armchair quarterbacks.
In The End of Love, Giralt Torrente’s story collection, many characters obsess over such moments. The speaker in “We Were Surrounded by Palm Trees,” reflecting on the final days of his relationship, says, “one of memory’s most powerful tendencies is to identify those moments when it would still have been possible to change the course of events.” He has been seduced by this moment. Memory loves to convince us we’re free, in control. It fills our heads with revisions, the house we might’ve owned, lovers we could’ve loved, jobs that would’ve fully inspired us, if only we’d kept playing piano or told Chris how he felt. But choice, for Giralt Torrente, is an illusion. Had the narrator in acted differently, he may have lengthened his relationship, but he would not have saved it.
This sentiment is powerfully expressed in the collection’s second story, “Captives.” It follows the narrator’s attractive older cousin, Alicia, and her husband, Guillermo. They were a young and beautiful couple, wealthy and itinerant, traveling to distract themselves from their loveless marriage. Alicia sends the narrator postcards and letters, but eventually their marital woes become exasperating. “I lost patience with [Alicia’s] lack of decisiveness. I thought that, as she seemed destined to leave Guillermo, any delay was stupid. Clearly, I underestimated her.” The relationship persists. And with Guillermo dying, the narrator visits the couple. They live on the same estate, in two separate houses, neither able to leave the other. On his death bed, Guillermo explains:
We believe we have an impregnable interior, a place where we are defended, where we can steel ourselves, but then it turns out that even we can’t get in. Even the most elemental things, our dreams, elude our will. How different everything would have been if my desire had obeyed me. Deep down, we have been equals, even in that. In her own way, Alicia and I have been captives of the same incapacity. [italics Giralt Torrente’s]
The will, here, exists, but it is in no way free. It is free the way dogs at the kennel are free to bark as loud as they like. To fully understand one’s desires is to see the discord between what is desired and what is obtained. In Father and Son, this is expressed in extended passages of longing—“I liked it when he considered me an equal . . . I liked to match his dilettantish hedonism . . . I liked to invade his territory . . . I wanted to learn, to be like him, and I imitated him”—which are repeatedly undercut: “But I hardly ever succeeded. I lacked so much of the knowledge I know he possessed. We squandered so many opportunities.” This is not simply weltschmerz. It is a further expression of Giralt Torrente’s somewhat Aristotelian conception of personhood: people do not change, they merely reach their inherent potential.
Giralt Torrente is, in other words, a fatalist resistant to fatalism. He isn’t trying to teach his characters lessons. He doesn’t think they are wrong for trying to pinpoint the moments when life changes, when personalities shift, but the ordeal is never successful. Giralt Torrente empathizes with the futile attempt to fully understand who we are. In Father and Son, death reminds him that “everything comes to an end, that there’s no redemption, that what wasn’t done can no longer be done.” Such a bleak realization, learned in life but expressed in the memoir, suggests that Giralt Torrente, knowing there is no redemption, still writes the memoir that strives to redeem its subjects.
There is nothing sensational, no gimmicks or zany protagonists, in Giralt Torrente’s fiction. The influence of Henry James is apparent. Giralt Torrente writing feels classically devoted to storytelling. His books are haunting, complex, and engrossing, peopled with well-developed, flawed characters that are obsessive and voluble, yet Giralt Torrente, for all the freedom he gives them to speak, never cedes control of his stories. One pleasure of reading his work is unlocking their structures, seeing time subtly manipulated, seeing what the characters do not, and may never, understand. His books are charged and evocative, loaded with precise, intelligent sentences that create worlds that are easy to enter and impossible to escape.

Each year, Wrestlemania offers the climax of various WWE storylines that have been at play. Will the underdog finally win the championship? Or will the dastardly villain succeed? Will someone from our past come back to save us? Will someone be betrayed? Will that cocky heel get what’s coming to him? Will the individual defeat the corporation? Will someone defeat the undefeated?

2 comments:

I think the loss of the unifying influence of the canon (consistently under attack by the forces of “multiculturalism” since at least the 1990s) is a big part of why it’s harder to bridge that gap between high school and college. It used to be that everyone (or almost everyone) coming into college had a shared experience in high school of reading, largely, the same texts (maybe you read “Macbeth” and I read “Othello” but essentially everyone had read at least one or two Shakespeare tragedies).

In the sciences, whether it be physics or psychology, that is still the case. There are certain basics, certain concepts and scholars and important crafters of theories and theses in the field that just about everyone learns in high school. For the humanities, in particular English, every student has read some different “flavor of the week” book that may or may not even be in print in ten years. Some are memoirs, some are best sellers, some are even children’s books/YA! (The Hunger Games books are fun for middle schoolers, and our kids need “fun reading,” escapist entertainment, but teaching them in a high school or college classroom is absurd)

“However great an injustice it was that mostly ‘dead white males’ had the opportunities necessary to write great literature in the Renaissance, it doesn’t fix that injustice to teach not-so-great literature instead. Affirmative action in the curriculum is as counterproductive as affirmative action in admissions. I mean, what good does it do women and minorities to enroll in college in greater numbers than in past, if the curriculum they get once they’re there is drastically dumbed down from the curriculum that white men used to get, back when mostly white men went to college?”
-Elizabeth Kantor

Funny how things work. I got 3 emails from friends asking what I think about Orhan Pamuk's prosecution. As you might have heard, Turkey is bringing charges against the prominent writer for denigrating the country. Clearly, this is a rather backward move in a country with aspirations of joining the EU. The issues at hand are the oh-so-touchy matters of the so-called Armenian genocide and the deaths caused by the Kurdish insurgency in southeastern Turkey. With regards to the first matter I will chose to remain silent as I do not consider myself well informed on the issue. Any good Turk, by my country's laws that is, would vehemently deny any such allegations and attempt to convince you that atrocities were committed by both sides (Ottomans and Armenians alike) and that it was during the Great War, and, well, shit like that happened in wars and thousands could perish for no good reason. I have a proclivity to side with this argument and, though the Turks might have inflicted greater damage on the Armenians, I believe the issue became more of a political tool as opposed to a matter of stating the obvious, as in the Holocaust. Having grown up in Turkey with an Armenian as a best friend and having had no exposure to the particular events concerning the Armenians in my Turkish History classes (perhaps because of the government's discretion) I defer to the little facts that there are and people's common sense, which usually lacks, on this issue.The second and more present issue of the Kurdish insurgency, however, is not as opaque as the Armenian issue. The PKK (that is the Kurdish People's Party, a terrorist organization banned by most countries, including the US and most of the EU) began it's uprising in 1984 and mounted it to great heights immediately after the First Gulf War. 1991-1996 was an especially bleak period where it was common to read of 8-25 deaths a day in each newspaper. During this period a good portion of Turkey's eastern provinces were under Martial Law, certain towns and cities believed to harbor terrorists were completely emptied, living conditions declined all around, and there was constant fighting in the mountains and along the border with Syria and Iraq. At one point Turkey was carrying out bombings in the Iraqi no fly zone and threatened war with Syria if it did not stop supporting, training, and housing PKK members. During the '90s over 30,000 people, civilians, soldiers, and terrorist, lost their lives in battles, bombings, and straight out massacres.Now back to Orhan Pamuk's assertions and prosecution. According to The Independent and the BBC, Pamuk stated that "[t]hirty thousand Kurds and one million Armenians were killed in these lands (Turkey)" in an interview with Tages Anzeiger, a Swiss newspaper, in February. I agree that there are certain historical inconsistencies that need to be fixed on the Armenian issue and certain necessary reforms for Turkey to overcome it's problems with Kurdish citizens. Pamuk's assertions, however, are more speculative and provocative, especially from a Turkish point of view. As I pointed out above, I will refrain from touching on the issues of the so-called Armenian genocide. As for the massacre of over 30,000 Kurds, however, I feel the obligation to point out that Pamuk has his facts wrong. The deaths were in both camps. There is a dire need to grant greater freedoms to the Kurdish population in Turkey, as well as a serious governmental obligation to improve life in the eastern parts of the country. To state that all the deaths were a result of aggressive government policies and that they were, without discrimination, strictly Kurdish, however, is a wrong and foul. It is also inconsiderate towards those who lost their lives in the fight against Kurdish terrorism. The flaw in Pamuk's statements is that they embody and support western, that is mostly European, perspectives on how Turkey did and should handle these two issues. Therefore, Pamuk falls afoul with the laws, which I admit are a bit backward, but further arouses discontent and pain among many Turkish citizens.All in all it is still disgraceful to prosecute Pamuk on the current charges. The government clearly has certain shortcomings. Otherwise they would be able to invite Pamuk to an open discussion and back arguments to the contrary with evidence. It is curious that the archives on both issues are either non-existent or jealously guarded. Pamuk is most likely to walk away from his trial without any damage, and the issue is bound to close. The greater problems at hand however, mainly dealing with the Armenian allegations of genocide and the separatist Kurds, are likely to be outstanding for the foreseeable future. I only wish that influential and smart people like Pamuk would use their stature for more productive activities as opposed to populist outburst. I am curious as to how Pamuk's trial will unfold, what backlash Turkey will receive in her ambitions for joining the EU, and most importantly how our government will one day address both issues.

If you could travel back in time to a particular literary era, like Woody Allen’s characters in Midnight in Paris, where would you prefer to drop in? The New York of Mailer and Capote? The Paris of Stein, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald? Not me. I’d defy all the glamour and glitz and go to soggy '70s London. Specifically, I would waltz into the Pillars of Hercules, an ancient pub on Greek Street in Soho, and report to the poet, critic and editor Ian Hamilton, who would no doubt be holding down the fort at the bar, an emperor-sized scotch in one hand and a cigarette in the other (they didn’t call him High-Tar Hamilton for nothing), and ask to review a book for his monthly magazine, The New Review. Its offices were just upstairs from the pub, but all the real business was completed bar-side. There in the Pillars I might encounter Martin Amis or Ian McEwan, Jonathan Raban, or Clive James, possibly even an ageing and manic Robert Lowell, ensconced by wide-eyed admirers. With any luck, I would become audience to one of Hamilton’s celebrated witticisms, like the one about the young poet who came down from Oxford to write for the magazine. According to legend, Hamilton took him downstairs to the pub at 11:30 in the morning and bought them two large scotches. “Oh no, I just can’t keep drinking,” the poet demurred, “I must give it up, it’s doing terrible things to me. I don’t even like it anymore.” To which Hamilton indignantly remarked: “Good god, man! None of us likes it.”
Karl Miller once remarked that you could write an anthology of Hamilton’s pub-sayings. Accordingly, much of the written material concerning him tends toward the personal-anecdotal: everyone seems to have their favorite Hamilton-zinger. Julian Barnes, for instance, whose go-to drink in those days was a gin and bitter lemon (hardly a pub-drink), recalls that “the first time Ian offered me a drink in the Pillars and I told him what I wanted, he didn't react, no doubt confident that he had misheard me. He was generously willing to stand me the round, but unable to pronounce every word in case the barman got the wrong idea. ‘Large whisky, pint of Old Skullsplitter, a gin and ...you say it.’ ‘Bitter lemon,’ I admitted, completing the order and my shame.” Hamilton makes a fictional cameo in Martin Amis’s novel The Pregnant Widow as the “charming, handsome, litigious, drink-drenched, debt-ridden, women-infested Neil Darlington,” and in North Face of Soho, the fourth of his so-called “Unreliable Memoirs,” Clive James devotes a couple of pages to his old friend and editor. One and a half of those pages are devoted to his old friend’s sexual success, which was by all accounts considerable. “At the height of his pulling power,” James writes, “he never had to do anything to get a woman he wanted except fight off the ones he didn’t, so as to give her a free run to the target.” Hamilton’s good looks, in collusion with his poetic air and understated cool, caught the attention of more than just a few women. But there was an attractive darkness, too; an ironic, reserved demeanor that hinted at something broken or damaged. “He had the knack of embodying self-destruction in an alluring form,” James writes. When the two of them did a reading together in Oxford they were approached by a gorgeous young student. Smitten, Clive James invited her to drop by at the Pillars when she was next in London. When she did, James greeted her enthusiastically at the bar. “Is he here?” was all she said to him.
It’s tempting to romanticize this kind of set-up, what with all pub-hub and boozy camaraderie, but it shouldn’t keep us from acknowledging the achievements of the magazine itself. Hamilton, though fearless, was a dream-editor. He launched his first literary journal, Scorpion, when he was in the sixth form at Darlington Grammar School, skipping class to ensure its distribution and getting in trouble for publishing it on the same day as the official school magazine. “It was an anti-school magazine,” Hamilton said. He would have much rather been playing soccer (a life-long passion; he was a self-professed “soccer bore”), but a heart condition prevented him from joining in with his fellow classmates. “I reached for my Keats,” he said. “I developed a kinship with sickly romantic poets who couldn’t play games.” When asked what eventually happened to that heart condition, Hamilton observed wryly that “it went away as soon as I started drinking.”
His editorial breakthrough arrived in the form of The Review, a journal bulging with poetry that followed the failure of Tomorrow, a “rather awful magazine” he’d launched in 1959 while a student at Oxford. The Review appeared in part because of the money Hamilton owed the printer of Tomorrow -- a pattern that repeated itself with The New Review. Along with like-minded poets such as John Fuller, Colin Falck, and the American Michael Fried, The Review established a reputation for its acidity and combativeness. “I saw myself protecting poetry against the pretenders, the charlatans, the fakes,” Hamilton explained. It lasted 10 years. During that time, Hamilton moved to London and became the Times Literary Supplement’s poetry editor, not to mention a published poet himself. A pamphlet, Pretending not to sleep, had appeared in 1964 as part of a special edition of The Review, while his debut collection The Visit was published by Faber & Faber in 1970.
When it was revealed that the cultural magazine Encounter, launched in 1953 by the poet Stephen Spender, was being covertly funded by the C.I.A., Spender left in protest, as did other high-ranking officers like the late Frank Kermode, and steps were taken by England’s Arts Council to launch a counter-Encounter. After years of meetings and lunches (presumably to discuss next week’s meetings and lunches) the project ultimately failed to materialize, but a sizable amount of money had been put aside and was, in Hamilton’s words, “just lying there.” Charles Osborne, the Council’s literary director, didn’t object when Hamilton suggested the funds be used to re-launch The Review as a monthly magazine. A year later, in April 1974, the inaugural issue of The New Review appeared, featuring contributions from Robert Lowell, Clive James, Al Alvarez, and Martin Amis, among others.
The magazine, with its glossy pages and design-conscious format, immediately caused a stir. This was the time, as Hamilton explained it, of widespread labor protests and Edward Heath’s three-day work week, and here was a large, baronial litmag priced at 90p an issue. “It did come under a lot of fire on all the waste-of-public money issues -- which was bollocks, because public money paid only for about half of any single issue,” Hamilton said. The money was a mixed blessing at best. The Council’s Literature Panel, a committee made up of fellow writers, turned out to be a pharisaical outfit. “The truth is that when you give a bunch of writers any kind of money-muscle, they go slightly mad,” Hamilton wrote in a later essay printed in Granta:
And when you put them on committees that give money to other writers, they go madder still. I can hear their voices now: “Mr Chairman, on a point of order, I feel it my duty to observe…” And this would be some foppish, dreamy-faced poetaster fresh from a three-absinthe lunch. But nearly all of them behaved like this. Wild-eyed anarchic novelists would transmute into prim-lipped accountants. Tremulous lyric poets would rear up like tigers of the bottom line. Book-reviewers who, I knew, lived in daily terror of being rumbled by the Revenue were all at once furrow-browed custodians of public funds.
Of necessity, Hamilton became one of literature’s great hustlers, jingling with money knowhow. “Knowing how many days pass between a final notice and a cut-off, knowing much time you gain with a carefully-phrased ‘WAFDA pdc’… such information is the small change of a life that’s sometimes financed by small change.” When the poet Craig Raine worked as books editor on Fridays, he once met a bailiff on the stairs who asked him if he was Ian Hamilton. Raine took him upstairs to the office and asked Ian Hamilton if he’d seen Ian Hamilton. “No,” Ian Hamilton said, “You just missed him.”
Hounded by debt collectors, pressured by printer’s fees, fearful that the Arts Council would come through on its threats to pull their funding (not to mention more local troubles, such as the mental illness of his first wife and their eventual divorce), Hamilton was ever under intense strain. “He was the only person I knew who was sued by his own solicitor,” Christopher Hitchens recalled. On one occasion his thick, dark hair began to turn white and fall out in clumps. Eventually it grew back again.
In 1999, two years before his untimely death at age 63, the Cargo Press published a festschrift, Another Round at the Pillars: Essays, Poems and Reflections, in which many of Hamilton’s old friends and contributors paid homage to the man who took a chance on their work and half-destroyed himself doing so. In his contribution to the book, Ian McEwan memorably evokes what it was like in the Pillars, amid all the fumes and vapors and drink:
In The Pillars I met “my generation” of writers -- male, born in the late forties -- and made friendships that will last me a lifetime -- among them Amis, Barnes, Raine, Fenton, Reid. Most of us had yet to publish our first books. We read each other with close, gossipy attention. It was a given that there was nowhere as good to place a story or poem as The New Review -- at least, until the Amis-Barnes era began at The [New] Statesman. If this was a literary clique, it was remarkably open. I took various friends along who weren’t really writers at all, but Ian treated them as though they were and gave them books to review. Anyone, it seemed, could wander in and get a drink. Junkies came in to shoot up in the lavatories upstairs. If you wandered in too often, you were likely to be given an unpaid job. Mine was at a desk in a corner of the packing room on the second floor. Ian asked me to read the short story slush pile and tell him if there was anything worth his consideration. It took me two weeks to discover that there wasn’t.
McEwan goes on, like practically everyone else who contributed to The New Review, to emphasize the central importance of Hamilton to the magazine. Despite a reputation for being coolly reticent with praise, and devoutly more butch with dispraise (he apparently once told a writer that, if torn into small strips, his piece might serve nicely as cat litter), he was an editor writers were eager to please. He encouraged them to do their best -- even if they weren’t getting paid (which they often weren’t). “There was no house style at all, but it had the personality of its editor, who was both hugely enthusiastic and encouraging and capable of scowling sardonically at what he thought was phony,” the writer Jonathan Raban recalls. “Hemingway famously said, ‘The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shockproof shit-detector,’ and was what Ian provided for us.” Scanning its back catalogues, The New Review’s quality is glaringly obvious: fiction by Ian McEwan, Nadine Gordimer, Jim Crace, Jean Rhys, Paul Theroux, and John Cheever; poetry by Tom Paulin, Robert Lowell, Seamus Heaney, and Zbigniew Herbert; essays and reportage by Jonathan Raban, Frank Kermode, John Carey, Mary-Kay Wilmers, Terry Eagleton, A. S. Byatt, and Germaine Greer. There were special features on Scientology, Jaws, and the IRA; entire plays by Harold Pinter and Bertolt Brecht; interviews with Saul Bellow and Gore Vidal. There was a recurring satirical column by Edward Pygge, a fictional name used to poke fun at the Modish London Literary World.
In The Little Magazines: A Study of Six Editors, a small book published in 1976, Hamilton looked closely at some of the most influential of the 20th century’s little magazines: The Little Review, Poetry, New Verse, The Criterion, Partisan Review, and Horizon. What characterized them were “small resources, small respect for the supposed mysteries of ‘how to run a business’, small appeal outside a very small minority of readers.” It’s hard to shake the sense that Hamilton, whether he is writing about T. S. Eliot and The Criterion or Geoffrey Grigson and New Verse, was also writing about himself and TheNew Review. He would definitely have sympathized with Eliot’s complaints to John Quinn in a letter of 1923: “I wish to heaven I had never taken up The Criterion… It has been an evergrowing responsibility… a great expense to me and I have not got a penny out of it: there is not enough money to run it and pay me too… I think the work and worry have taken 10 years off my life.” And no doubt he must have been a little inspired by Grigson’s sardonic willingness to make enemies, even of his friends. Just as practically all poet-contributors to New Verse would eventually see their own work savagely debunked in its pages, so Hamilton never shied away from publishing reviews that were critical of the writing of friends or contributors. Before John Carey’s panning of Clive James’ The Metropolitan Critic appeared in The New Review's pages, Hamilton showed James the typescript over drinks at the Pillars. “In the name of editorial integrity,” James wrote, “he not only didn’t mind making enemies, he didn’t mind hurting his friends either.” James, however, didn’t hold a grudge: his second collection of essays, published five years later, bore the title At the Pillars of Hercules.
“Each magazine needs a new decade,” Hamilton wrote, “and each decade needs a new magazine.” Clearly The New Review was the magazine of the '70s, and though he believed that the ideal lifespan of a little magazine was 10 years, it only ever made it to five. The Arts Council pulled the plug in 1979 and The New Review collapsed under a ton of debt. Hamilton remained in financial rubble for years to come, though eventually made a living from his journalism and, later, as the author of acclaimed biographies of Robert Lowell (Robert Lowell: A Biography) and J. D. Salinger (Ian Hamilton, being Ian Hamilton, was naturally sued for In Search of J D Salinger -- by Salinger himself). He wrote learned and entertaining volumes about the lives of writers and their biographers -- Writers in Hollywood 1915-1951 (1990); Keepers of the Flame: Literary Estates and the Rise of Biography (1992); A Gift Imprisoned: The Poetic Life of Matthew Arnold (1998); Against Oblivion: Some Lives of the Twentieth-Century Poets (2002) -- as well as several volumes of essays and reviews, not to mention two books on Paul Gascoigne, the once-controversial English soccer star. “I think every book I’ve written has some strong autobiographical element in it. That seems to me okay,” he told Dan Jacobson in the London Review of Books shortly before his death.
Nothing was more autobiographical than his poetry, and turning from the wry, self-deprecating voice of his journalism to the spare, somber voice of his verse is something of a shock. His deeply personal subject matter -- his father’s illness and early death when Hamilton was just thirteen; his first wife’s mental illness; his divorces and disappointments -- are not, like the later poems of Robert Lowell, evoked with all the reticence of a tell-all tabloid spread. Instead, Hamilton’s poems are like eavesdropping on one half of a private conversation. Stripped of personal context, whatever private crisis was there has to be inferred by the reader -- Hamilton remains stoically silent. But the emotional intensity, though sparing, is anything but:
I am dumpy, obtruse, old and out of it.
At night, I can feel my hands prowl over me,
Lightly probing at my breasts, my knees,
The folds of my belly,
Now and then pressing and sometimes,
In their hunger, tearing me.
I live alone.
The poetic voice comes as a jolt when compared to the prose, but the two are in no way contradictory. They are contained in each other. In a little analysis of the “none of us likes it” quip that I opened with, the critic James Wood rightly observes that the joke implies a “stoical tragi-comic world…a picture at once funny and sad.” Hamilton was funny in the way of a proverb from William Blake’sThe Marriage of Heaven and Hell: “Excess of sorrow laughs.” His self-deprecating tone is amusing and charming but, like the tip of the iceberg, is sustained by the bulk of private terrors submerged beneath it. In the long interview he gave to Dan Jacobsen in the London Review of Books at the end of his life, the same note is struck again and again. Of The New Review he says: “Looking back, I think I should probably have done it differently, but I didn’t, so there it was. And it still looks pretty okay to me and has some really quite good stuff in it.” When you look at those back issues, pretty okay and quite good are not exactly phrases that leap to mind -- nor do they seem to be phrases Hamilton deployed merely out of a sense of false modesty. The New Review, after all, was a result of serial failures, and in the end must have seemed like something of failure to its creator, too. When it folded and he left the magazine racket for good, he went on to occupy an uncertain ground as a sometime-poet and occasional-biographer. There would have been plenty of occasions for the intense self-doubt he admired in Matthew Arnold. In his book on Arnold, published very late in his life, he put a quote of the poet’s at the beginning that he was very fond of:
It is a sad thing to see a man who has been frittered away piecemeal by petty distractions, and who has never done his best. But it is still sadder to see a man who has done his best, who has reached his utmost limits -- and finds his work a failure, and himself far less than he had imagined himself.
Posterity isn’t usually kind to editors, biographers, critics, or even poets. Hamilton was all four, sometimes by accident, always by virtue of his wit, intelligence and quiet rebelliousness. Still, he very likely saw himself frittered away piecemeal and, if not exactly as a failure, then as less than he imagined himself. It’s fair to say, I think, that he made a career of his many failures: his failure to become a soccer star, his failures in the magazine business, the private failures that fuelled his poetry. He tried, he failed, and then he failed better. At certain moments we may wish to acknowledge the inevitability of this -- in writing as in life. Those of us who lack the madcap artistic genius of a Lowell or a Salinger, and whose greatest gift to literature may simply be to serve it, will often feel that we have courted failure. Though he was not a genius or a great artist, Hamilton served literature by setting a great example (The Lowells and the Salingers of this world are hardly exemplary). In a kinder world, his achievements would have yanked him from the penury of posterity. But no matter. I still want to time-warp back to the Pillars, when Hamilton, in the words of his poem “Returning,” was at his best:
Dear friend, I wish you could have seen
This place when it was at its best,
When I was,
But it isn’t far. It isn’t far. Come with me.